Can't boot into any OS after getting an IO BSOD.

[specs and whatnot in sig.]
SO. Story time. My laptop is in the line of Toshiba's that doesn't play nice with Windows 7. It's a known issue with my model that it will randomly bluescreen because of a display driver kernel issue, at least that's what I've speculated from reading lots of forums and experiencing the issue myself.
Because of this issue, I've gotten accustomed to reading the BSOD when it flashes on my screen. Suddenly, a few hours ago, my AVG popped up saying there was something wrong, and before I could click on "move to vault" or even read the other options.. I BSOD'd. I thought, oh, coincidence, it's probably just a driver error like always. I glanced at the paragraph explaining the error... and it was something I'd never seen before. It said something about a drive and an IO error. Couldn't read it fast enough :/ I waited for my computer to start booting again, no big deal. I left the room when it was booting up, past the Toshiba system screen and when it was at the black screen with the blinking line in the upper left corner. I came back about 5-10 minutes later.. and it was still on the screen. Obviously, there was something that wasn't right. I tried rebooting. Same thing happened. I tried furiously tapping at F8 to try to get to safe mode.. and the same thing happened.
My father does computer tech stuff, and when I told him he took a look at my computer. He noticed that it was extremely hot, although it gets really hot anyway. However, he suggested that I let it cool off before he looked at it again.
So, it being a chilly night, I opened the window and had my laptop rest next to it. About half an hour later, the problem prevailed. My father suggested that it might be a hard drive issue, still saying that it might have over heated and damaged the hard drive and is preventing it from working.
I have my Windows 7 on a flash drive, which I have with me. However, it's not set up to actually boot from the drive itself. Thankfully, or so I thought, my father had his emergency flash drive with a bootable Windows XP Professional on it. We put it in my computer, and waited. I chose my spare Ubuntu partition from the list that I rarely use, and installed XP. The installation went smoothly, until directly after when it tried to boot into the OS. It gave me a message saying there was something wrong with booting into Windows, there was a failure and that I should read my hard drive's manual. Lol?
Next, my dad suggested deleting all of the partitions on my hard drive. I didn't have a problem with this, because I had reformatted recently and there hadn't been many changes to what was saved on my external. So, I deleted everything except the original Toshiba System partition that I don't want to get rid of in case I can get back onto this hard drive. It contains data that I can use to write to a few discs to make myself some new factory reset CDs, which I have lost. I wasn't even aware I still *had* this partition, and was relieved to see it on the list when installing XP.
Regardless, the issue held strong and I got the same error, after trying again a few more times.
Can anyone shed light on this? Sorry this was so long, I wanted to put in a lotta detail
I can get the exact error message that Windows XP is giving me when I try to boot into it if necessary.

Last resort: buying a new hard drive OR sending it into -gag- the Geek Squad because I have a nice extended warranty that I could potentially take advantage of if I want to lose my computer for a good two weeks+. I guess, considering that it's a brick right now, it's not really that big of a loss. But I like fixing things myself if it's possible.

 

It sounds like you could have a bad hard drive, but then again, sometimes having those restore partitions can cause problems, too. It may be relying on having a properly configured boot record on the restore partition and that could have gotten messed up from, well, whatever.

I would say to go ahead and make the restore CD's if you can. Then delete ALL partitions on the drive. If you have a low level utility to low level hard drives, I would suggest running it and let it low level your HDD for at least 5 minutes. Then re-install windows with a fresh disc. If you want to try windows 7 again, use an old driver for that x1250. Try to use an ATi vista driver from, say, 2007. Most ATi drivers later than the Catalyst 9.2 series will give MAJOR issues with their legacy cards!

 

Well, from the XP installation, I couldn't even fix the mbr in the repair option. I tried a bunch of things.
And, I can't boot into anything. So.. no utilities, and no ability to create those restore CDs that I want. When I get home from my dad's, I'll have access to my Ubuntu CDs and I can see if I can do anything from there. As of right now, my brother's laptop is what's allowing me to even post here XD

Mmn, and about the ATi drivers. The last actual update was for I believe 2008, or early 2009 before Windows 7 was released. And then the card stopped being supported xD..And Toshiba has failed to acknowledge the issue between the card and W7, so yeah, Vista driver it would be haha.

 

Wow, I didn't know you couldn't boot to anything.

I do think if you can get into Linux Ubuntu you should be able to alter your partitions through it. Then, if all partitions are gone, it will have no other choice but to boot to something else.

Out of sheer curiosity, how did you install Windows 7 the first time anyway? Was it a CD or one of those bootable USB flash drives? I put windows 7 on a USB drive myself and installed from it and man it's fast!!!

 

yeah, not being able to boot into anything hasn't been very helpful in this situation.
Yess, hopefully even running off of the live CD will let me have the functionality of my laptop until I do whatever to get it fixed again.

Well, funny story actually xD I accidentally screwed up my partitions and couldn't boot into anything But it was a whoole different thing than this. Linux and it's little grub loader to choose what to boot into can cause issues if you don't get rid of it correctly! I deleted the linux partition while in Windows 7 without realizing that the grub loader would be a pain in the telling me that it couldn't boot. And the multiple windows 7 discs that I had previously used to install windows 7 didn't work! it was very odd. After running off of the live CD for a week, my friend lent me a windows vista disc that came with his computer, and lo and behold, it let me install! however, i was unable to connect to the internet, and device manager told me that where were a ton of issues, couldn't download any of my drivers, etc. So, I decided to re-partition and get a dual boot going again, so i could use my laptop. I eventually was able to get my windows 7 files onto the partition to write to a flash drive, and i used a program that was supposed to format the flash drive to be able to be a bootable file system, but it apparently didn't work. regardless, I booted into Vista and just did the upgrade to 7, and that worked perfectly. But yeah, flashdrives go faster whichever way you do it xD It's quite practical!

 

Yeah, those grub loaders can be a mess if they aren't dealt with just right. My MiniPE USB flash drive is set up with a grub loader and dare I even mess with that LOL.

When you mentioned the device manager showing probs it sounds like it just didn't have the drivers for all your stuff and if you didn't have network drivers installed, well, you'll N3V3r get online LOL!!! If you were able to upgrade from Vista which did have the drivers and upgraded to 7 like that then all the more power to ya. I'll bet it's because most of those drivers weren't included in 7 and when you upgraded from V to 7, Win 7 just kept the drivers from Vista and used them.

If I AM correct about that previous statement, maybe you'll want to go to Toshiba's website and download all their drivers there and put them on a CD in case you need them later for something like that. Then you'll have them on hand if you want to do a fresh install for 7.

I hear that upgrading from Vista to 7 takes quite some time, but I guess that's also if you have a lot of stuff in your documents folder or something.

 

Yeah, there were numerous issues with Windows 7 that I found some sort of solution to. Webcam issues, and I had BSODs from issues other than the graphics card being dumb. I might have fixed it, maybe. I went from bluescreening every 10 minutes or so to being clean for about a week.. and then this happened lol.

 

If you were blue screening like that, then yeah. Sounds like a project. Hell, if you can find a way to make win 7 work on that notebook properly and you can remember how you made it work, you could post here what you did for anyone else using that series of Toshiba. I'm pretty sure a lot of Toshiba owners would like that.

I would probably start with a BIOS update, use crazy driver scanners to find newer drivers for everything in the machine (other manufacturers have the same components in other notebooks and update certain drivers that other mfgs won't). Try tweaking the BIOS, a few settings win windows, etc..

Given enough time & effort, you just might be able to perfect it and have the Windows 7 awesomeness working on that Toshiba.

I have also seen dying hard drives cause a lot of blue screens. Also check to see if the memory isn't possibly causing issues. If memory goes bad, that can cause all sorts of problems, too. Not saying that's what it is, but, you know, just throwing my best ideas out there hoping they'll be helpful.

I hope you can eventually get that to work right. That would be really cool.

 

I'll definitely be posting a thread in the Toshiba forums once I'm back up and running

And a nice update--
I booted from a live ubuntu CD, and was able to install it onto my harddrive without an issue. I was even able to keep the Toshiba recovery partition! I'm about to try what I did last time I had an issue, installing vista first, and then upgrading to Windows 7 within there. Will update again with results :]